Sampson`s Silly Theory On Immigrants And Crime

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Ill-informed and innumerate theorizing about crime
trends is a popular pastime among America`s ambitious
academics and pundits. The latest example:
Open Doors Don`t Invite Criminals, a March 11thNew York Times op-ed by Harvard sociologist
Robert J. Sampson claiming that massive Hispanic
immigration has reduced America`s crime rate in
recent years.

It`s
easy to see why this silly theorizing happens. There are
vast and highly un-PC differences in criminal tendencies
among the different races—for example, African-Americans
wind up in prison an incredible
33 times more often per capita than
Asian-Americans. So the Mainstream Media almost
never dole out enough information on
crime trends to foster understanding.

My
favorite example up to now: the
popular theory put forward by celebrity economist
Steven D. Levitt in his massive 2005 bestseller
Freakonomics that the legalization of abortion
from 1970-1973 caused the late-1990s crime drop by pre-natally
culling future criminals.

Yet,
as I pointed out to Levitt when we debated his theory in
Slate.com in 1999, he forgot to look at crime rates
by the proper age groups. In reality, the crime decline
began among those born before the legalization of
abortion. Those born in the years after

"Fertility declines for
black women
[due to the legalization of abortion] are three times
greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4
percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are
roughly nine times higher than those of white youths,
racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion
are likely to translate into greater homicide
reductions."

Another example of silly theorizing: In his bestseller
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offered his
theory of why
New York City crime had declined in the 1990s, based
on his insight into the marketing concept of tipping
points.

You
see, and follow me closely here, rising trends, such as
crime rates or sneaker sales, tend to go up until
they reach a "tipping point," and then they go
down. Or vice-versa. Or sometimes they reach a
tipping point and then they go up even faster. Or down
even faster. It`s hard to predict.

If
that explanation of tipping points isn`t totally clear,
you can
pay Gladwell $40,000 to come out and explain it at
your annual sales conference. (Gladwell
and Levitt`s co-author
Stephen J. Dubner are currently debating each other
on their respective blogs. For once, the normally
lucratively vague Gladwell may have more specifics on
his side.)

Now,
along comes Robert J. Sampson`s theory in the NYT:

"[E]vidence points to increased immigration as a major factor
associated with the lower crime rate of the 1990`s (and
its recent leveling off)."

This makes
Levitt`s abortion theory look like Einstein`s General
Theory of Relativity. I mean, Levitt`s theory at least
sounds semi-plausible, if you don`t actually know the
historical facts. But Sampson`s is self-evident
flapdoodle. It has to be one of the sillier theories
ever seen in the New York Times—and that`s saying
a lot!

Why
do we see such knuckleheaded arguments in favor of
immigration in the prestige press? Because incisive
thinking about the subject has been ruled off-limits. If
you criticized this op-ed by pointing out that the
Hispanic imprisonment rate is
2.9 times the white rate, as reported in The
Color of Crime 2005, recently published by
Jared Taylor`s New Century Foundation, then you are
an evil racist and nobody should listen to you. The
Establishment`s most effective ploy in eliminating
debate over immigration has been to insinuate that
only shallow (or sick) people think deeply about
immigration.

Sampson presents the following graph to show that
immigration flows were negatively correlated with
homicides in the 1990s.

My
response:

First, even if all immigrants were utterly
law-abiding, only the homicide rate would fall—not the total number
of homicides, as shown on this graph.

Second, immigration wasn`t sizable enough to
even theoretically account for much of the decline
in the crime rate. According to Sampson, net
immigration per year was running at about a half
percent of the American population in the mid 1990s.
So, if every single immigrant were a crime-free
saint, then the homicide rate would fall a half
percent per year. But the total number of homicides
was falling more than an order of magnitude faster.
(In fact, of course, immigrants aren`t all saints,
as the vicious Salvadoran
Mara Salvatrucha gang shows.)

Third, Sampson`s contention that the slight
decline in the rate of immigration in this decade
has contributed to the rise in homicides is even
more irrational. He`s confusing the rate of new immigrants entering the
country with the stock of immigrants already in
the country, which is the only number that might even
theoretically impact the murder rate. Sampson`s theory
would only work if every time a new immigrant
disembarks from his plane at JFK airport, somewhere
in America a murderer stays his hand.

Now,
it`s mathematically possible that an influx of Mexicans,
with their high crime rates, can marginally lower the
overall crime rate in a city, such as New York, by
"economically cleansing" blacks, with their
extremely high crime
rates. If blacks flee New York because
Mexicans are taking their jobs and causing rents to
go up, that could make the New York crime rate go down.

Of
course, on the national level, Mexican immigration just
raises the crime rate because African-Americans have to
go
somewhere else in our country. (But you can see why
Mexicans driving blacks from New York to other
cities would appeal to the self-interest of the
editors of the New York Times.)

Sampson does tell us one useful thing: all else being
equal, propensity toward violence increases as
immigrants assimilate:

"Indeed, the
first-generation immigrants (those born outside the
United States) in our study were 45 percent less likely
to commit violence than were third-generation Americans,
adjusting for family and neighborhood background.
Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less
likely to commit violence than the third generation."

This
isn`t surprising. New immigrants often arrive too old to
join youth gangs and they are scared of deportation. But
their American-born sons grow up on the streets feeling
much more confident, and much more territorial about
their native neighborhoods. The gangs, like the
18th Street Gang in LA, get the American-born ones
young. As "Color
of Crime 2005" reports, "Hispanics are 19
times more likely than whites to be members of youth
gangs."

So,
by importing vast numbers of Hispanic immigrants now,
according to Sampson`s data, we`re just making an
unholy mess for ourselves in the future.

Finally, Sampson [send him
mail] is wrong about Hispanic immigrants being
the cause of lower violent crime rates because we
know which ethnic group contributed primarily to the
recent decline in homicides—and it wasn`t Latinos.

No,
it was the same group that also contributed the most to
the previous rapid rise in murders from 1984 to
1991: African-Americans. They commit a little over half
the murders in America.

Please note that in order to minimize public
awareness of Hispaniccriminality,
the federal government, which is
otherwise so careful to break Hispanics out
separately in its statistics, counts all Hispanic
murderers as "Whites." So we can`t learn anything
from federal statistics about Hispanic murder rates. All
we know is that the actual non-Hispanic white rate is
even lower than shown in the graph. (Ask
the federal government why it does this.)

What you can see is that the black murder rate
rises and falls much faster than the white/Hispanic
rate. This is probably due to convulsions in the drug
markets. The worst year of the powder cocaine dealers`
wars was 1980. It was followed by a sharp decline in the
black murder rate that reversed when the
crack cocaine wars began. They peaked in 1990-1994
and then were followed by a sizable decline, which,
unfortunately, has bottomed out in this decade.

In terms of number of murders, the low in recent
decades was 1984, at 20,337 homicides across all races.
From 1984 up through the
peak year for murders in 1991 (at 28,268), blacks
accounted for 84 percent of the rise in homicides
committed.

Then, from 1991 until the low year in 1999 (at 17,402
murders), blacks, who make up only 13 percent of the
population, contributed 65 percent of the decline in
murders.

So, what did actually cause violent crime to
drop—especially in New York City?

An overlooked explanation was brought up by Newhouse
News reporter
Jonathan Tilove recently: there are today in New
York City, 36 percent more black women alive than black
men. Nationally, there are now 26 percent more black
women than men. In contrast, among the total population,
there are just 8 percent more women than men alive.

Tilove wrote:

"In the March/April issue
of
Health Affairs,
Dr. David Satcher, surgeon general under former
President Bill Clinton, … exposes the core of the
problem: Between 1960 and 2000, the disparity between
mortality rates for black and white women narrowed while
the disparity between the rates for black and white men
grew wider. Exponentially higher homicide and AIDS rates
play their part, especially among younger black men." [Where
have all the black men gone? May 08, 2005]

Obviously, this gigantic black male shortage in NYC
wasn`t caused by abortion or by immigration—there was
virtually no
sex selective abortion at the time. No, it was
mostly caused by an enormous increase in imprisonment
and by the most dangerous black men murdering
each other in large quantities in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. (AIDS played a role too in killing off drug
addicts.)

Freakonomics` Levitt has never written, as far
as I know, about the impact of these
"selective post-natal abortions," as it were, on
the crime rate. But it`s clearly a substantial factor in
a number of big cities that were hit hard by crack.

Moreover,
as I pointed out to Levitt in 1999—and as his
deservedly famous chapter in Freakonomics on
how dealing crack pays so badly confirmed—a lot of the
next cohort of urban youths, those born more than a half
decade after abortion was legalized in their state,
figured out that
dealing crack was a stupid career choice. Seeing how
their older brothers and cousins wind up in
prisons,
wheelchairs, and cemeteries, they became less likely
to commit murder.

Participating in the crack wars turned out to be, for
the vast majority of the gangstas, extremely bad life
choices. It`s hardly surprising that the later cohort,
born in the early 1980s, did a better job of figuring
this out.

So, the good news is that poor teens in the ghetto
can eventually figure out the difference between smart
and stupid.

The bad news, as exemplified by Professor Sampson`s
op-ed, is that the Harvard faculty and the New York
Times can`t.

[Steve Sailer [emailhim] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and